Launching a game! It’s a thing that happens – I, for one, am still recovering. (I went to the gym for the first time in three weeks today and it was awful. Please, just somebody put me out of my misery.)

For those of you who have bought the game, we thank you for your patronage and appreciate it. We are currently working our way through the usual list of bug fixes and improvements that you discover are necessary as soon as you launch a game; those of you who are sending us crash dumps or bug reports, we’re reading them all and are working our way through them as fast as we can. For those of you who have written to let us know that you’re enjoying the game, we really appreciate that too.

Clockwork Empires version 1.0 has emerged, glistening, from its development-spore and launched on Steam! We are out of Early Access and into the wild frontier that calls for Colonial Bureaucrats to manage bustling colonies and chop down all the trees and maybe start a cult maybe for Progress and Civilization! You can purchase Clockwork Empires through Steam or the Humble Store (which provides a Steam key*) for a 10% discount for the next week!

* We will be setting up non-Steam distribution of Clockwork Empires via the Humble Store and possibly other online distributors in the near future.

The Development Progress Report has been updated with a full annotated changelog for version 55A to version 1.0. We’ll put the full changelog at the end of this post for those interested in seeing what the last month month of Early Access has brought to the game.

This is not, of course, the end of work on Clockwork Empires: We shall be continuing support for game stability and bugfixes, and we have a list of additional content and some small features we’d like to add post-release.

So we’re coming up on the launch of Clockwork Empires in, uh, exactly one week from now. Everyone in the office is furiously testing/polishing/balancing/implementing the last few features/flipping out. You can imagine that no one (except me) was volunteering to write a blog post, so I threatened to write one where I just showed my favourite icons from Clockwork Empires and rambled about why I liked them.

So many icons! (These are not, however, my favourites.)

There was enthusiastic support for this notion. So much for that threat. Still: an Artist never bluffs, so this week we’re going to talk about My Favourite Icons.

Oh yeah, heads up: the first one is cannibalism, so brace yourself for Thematic Imagery.

As we build up to release, we must consider and balance gameplay difficulty as a whole given the set of game mechanics features we are working with. There are not only multiple axes upon which difficulty might be defined – and upon which gameplay mechanics operate – but also a diverse spectrum of expectations and player-types to consider.

Fish Massacre At New Sogwood 3: The Enbloodening

On the one hand we have combat-hardened veterans of the Frontier who have sunk hundreds of hours into Clockwork Empires. These players derive grim pleasure from deconstructing our systems then optimizing them for maximum in-game effect while rampaging cannibalistic cultists tear each other apart amidst volleys of gunfire. On the other hand, we have players who just bought the game (or will soon buy the game) who are mostly fascinated by watching their colonists live little lives and decorating houses. Both players have legitimate needs! If a swarm of fishpeople busts into this latter fantasy and eats everyone, that player gets really upset. If a swarm of fishpeople doesn’t bust into the fantasy of the previous player type, they get really upset. And everyone is upset with us if we do any of this without giving proper warning.

The official 1.0 build of Clockwork Empires will be launched October 26th!

We first released the game for purchase in “Earliest Access” over 2 years ago, and we’re proud of just how far the game has come, in part thanks to our dedicated early-access players. Clockwork Empires has changed quite a bit but, the central concept has stayed the same: manage the growth of a colony of settlers on the steampunk frontier, as they learn to deal with the horrors of the unknown.

We’re putting a hold on the “Experimental” builds leading up to the launch date so we can surprise you with some more stuff when the time comes, but expect new events, more cults and monsters, along with all the other polish that you would expect as the doomsday clock ticks ominously forwards to midnight and version 1.0.

This will, of course, not be the last update for Clockwork Empires, but we have reached the point where we feel that the important elements are all here (or will be before The Time). We will of course continue to find and fix bugs as they appear, add content and adjust the balance of the game beyond version 1.0 – while the game won’t see support forever, just like our previous title Dungeons of Dredmor, the journey doesn’t end on release.

If you’re interested in the road that we traveled to get to this point, I would invite you to take a look at the Development Progress report that we have kept up-to-date every month since August 2014. (And if you’d like to check out the game in the weeks before release – or just wishlist it – the steam store page can be found Here.)

We want to thank everyone who has been a part of this journey with us: supporting us by buying Clockwork Empires, talking with us about your experiences, pointing us at new (and sometimes old) bugs, sending us saves and crash dumps, and giving us suggestions to improve it. I can, without any reservation, say that we could not have done this without you. We are grateful to be able to create games for you, and doing it with you has been an amazing experience.

When the needs of gameplay conflict with realism, which must win? (Spoiler alert: gameplay. And realism isn’t really realism.)

From a historical perspective, producing firearms requires a fairly sophisticated industrial base. In Clockwork Empires, pre-Beta 55, producing and using any firearms beyond the default pistols also required a fairly sophisticated industrial base. And by fairly sophisticated industrial base we mean that pre-55, the very first weapon upgrade could only be rushed by an experienced player in a minimum of an hour or two of gameplay in a mad rush toward the Metalworks. And that’s with laser-like focus and insider knowledge of mechanics. (If advanced players take this comment as an invitation to see who can rush to firearm production the quickest, then let’s do it!)

UI for all offices now has various alerts for reasons why work cannot be performed due to lack of overseer/modules/supplies

mine UI now displays more information

added visual cue to indicate that a module must be affixed to a wall

all recipes should now grey out correctly depending on your materials

all modules in the game now have sort IDs and will display in the Modules Menu in a much more logical order

added/improved tooltips on a large number of constructions and buildings

renamed some office UI to try and make it a bit more clear

added more info to character panel tooltips

fixed order strings so they now also work on the filter buttons on the module placer UI

added randomized start backgrounds

added command tooltip details

did polish changes to where tooltips show up

made improvement to tutorial controls image

did major update to all tutorial text

redid a number of building tutorial images

wrote all Colonial Handbook help files

removed a mysterious sound that played when nothing happened

workshop button now turns red when commodities are unavailable for a production that is set for a job

area designation stamps now highlight what objects can be selected

“Designate Building” dialog now attaches to blueprint for confirmation once it is drawn out

lack of booze for Public House will generate alerts

Fishperson-related alerts should have sounds more consistently now

added product listing to mine tooltip

failure states for workshop jobs now show properly

added parent container code for office UI buttons

Quality of Life is now a first class element in the character info panel

Combat tooltips pared down significantly

building quality display improved

can now add widgets to the front of a container’s stack

scrollbar track clicks are now more useful (sorry track clickers, i never do it, didn’t realize what a sorry state that was in)

improved nametag code, incorporated alert icons into nametags

made interactive objects like rocks and trees have tooltips that are anchored and show up instantly rather than being on the cursor and having a delay. Some new players weren’t seeing them at all, so this should improve their visibility.

all instances of “work crew” have been changed to “overseer” to make difference between LC/MC chars clearer

you will now be alerted if you build a building with no door

FIXED: static buttons for work crews

FIXED: finally fixed our scrollable vert boxes so they don’t do weird things with scrolling too far and their padding isn’t horrible. Finally. After i think 2 years of this bug.

FIXED: edge cases for the building confirmation window

FIXED: offset so that modules menu isn’t below the screen

FIXED: progress bars with “0” percent in them still showed some percent

FIXED: lock up in character screen when character had maxed out skill tree or zero skill

balance: QoL effects adjusted to have more effect but not be completely extreme

balance: Immigration now takes longer between waves the later you are in the game (max immigrants increases as well, however)

balance: Chapel effects now emphasize lowering despair

balance: Pub effects now emphasize lowering anger

FIXED: attempt_emote.fsm

FIXED: scripterror in building name change

FIXED: some food was tagged as both overseer and labourer-preferred

FIXED: added check for scripterror when bandit group self-deletes

Jobs/Assignment

construction assignments will now always be prioritized over other work assignments

rewrote all flatten terrain code. flatten terrain jobs are now not listed in a giant bulky mess at the start of the assignment, but are assigned first-come-first-serve. this fixes lurching performance issues when a user has a lot of flatten terrain jobs selected, as well as… works…

moved flatten terrain to assignment beacon, so it can be cancelled etc.

Flatten terrain target height now displays in tooltip

added a safety check for if you removed a worker from the academy while they were working

removing forageables can be done via left-click, per object

FIXED: assignment beacon drop zones now only show those beacons visible for the current selection mode

FIXED: assignment beacons now correctly encompass all objects inside (Although it is a little conservative)

Biomes

added new ore distribution – varies based on climatic zone

added locking and unlocking of embark locations by biome type

removed the Alone loadout

added details for unlocking biomes

balance: added more high ground in temperate swamp biome

balance: added more guaranteed starting surface clay/stone

Military/Combat

Barracks now displays weapon stats & otherwise has a useful UI

Barracks now used to supply ammunition to soldiers; different weapons use different types of ammo. If ammo runs out, soldiers will default to using pistol